Why a Clinician Went Back to School: Weight Stigma, Unheard Voices, and the Gap Between Practice and Research Leon (Li-Hsiang) Yang, M.Ed.

Abstract

Background. After nearly a decade of clinical practice – in counseling centers, a family court, a sexual assault recovery center, and community outreach settings across Taiwan – the presenter returned to doctoral study not to escape practice, but because practice kept generating questions that the existing literature could not answer. Two questions proved most persistent. First: why do clients with obesity experience so consistently arrive in therapy already braced for judgment, even before a word has been spoken? And second: why does the international psychotherapy evidence base have so little to say about this population in non-Western contexts – and about so many other populations whose suffering is clinically visible but scientifically unrecorded? These questions reflect a structural…